Design

Hungarian paper money on Behance: My MA degree project is a banknote series for which I came up with a fictional currency, the Hungarian euro. The common side of each note features european animals, the other side shows related species of plants. I used the original proportions of the existing euro banknote for my design, as the denomination increases, the size of each banknote is growing. The animals also represent the growth of value.

Shortfilms

Blood Drinker: Mikey dropped out of college to become an unlikely hero. This is his story.

Over the Moon on Vimeo: A feminist space adventure about kick-ass comic book heroine Connie Radar as she attempts to prevent the first moon landing.

¡MONSTRO! on Vimeo: A rickety scientific expedition ventures down the Amazon River to a dark lagoon, in search of a mythic Creature! But the Creature, it seems, has a less than mythic agenda! MONSTRO! is a horror story. A love story. A ribald comedy!

ISOLATED: After finding himself in a wrecked taxi, Evan tries to figure out the pieces of the puzzle, while dealing with a dangerous threat, in a seemingly deserted city.

Mr. O on Vimeo: With the background of oiled bodies, bulging muscles, and wide mouthed smiles, there is Mr. O, at the ripe age of 66, who works as hard, as long, and as disciplined as any other bodybuilder at Muscle Beach in Venice, California. He commutes two hours from a bad part of town to begin his daily workout routine. In this "big dog eat dog" world, he lifts and flexes to disprove the expectations of the crack and dope world he is from. And with every lunge and squat, Mr. O moves closer to his mission of becoming Mr. Universe.

Tsunami on Vimeo: Haru returns home in denial after a tsunami, where he must learn to deal with his loss through an encounter with a magical sea Spirit.

Cloudrise on Vimeo: Set in a fantasy world above the clouds, Cloudrise follows a pivotal moment in the lives of two lovers as they face a great challenge. Watch as Miko and Tenku fight to survive an attack on their new airship and take the necessary measures to help each other. Hold on to your seat as you witness how far someone is willing to go to rescue the one they love. This is an action-packed short film that ties together various fantasy/science fiction influences.

President Obama: I'm A Big Believer In Strong Encryption... But... | Techdirt: Last Friday, at the White House's Cybersecurity Summit at Stanford, reporter Kara Swisher sat down for a half-hour interview with President Obama (and she even dragged her famous red chairs along). It's a better, more in-depth interview than you're ever likely to see from the established mainstream press, and touches on a variety of issues regarding technology and security. While I don't agree with some of the answers, I will say that the President appears to be extremely well-briefed on these issues, and didn't make any totally ridiculous or glaringly misleading remarks.

What ISIS Really Wants - The Atlantic: The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

The Gay Capital of the Nineteenth Century - The New Yorker: Ulrichs, essentially the first gay activist, encountered censorship and ended up going into exile, but his ideas very gradually took hold. In 1869, an Austrian littérateur named Karl Maria Kertbeny, who was also opposed to sodomy laws, coined the term “homosexuality.” In the eighteen-eighties, a Berlin police commissioner gave up prosecuting gay bars and instead instituted a policy of bemused tolerance, going so far as to lead tours of a growing demimonde. In 1896, Der Eigene (“The Self-Owning”), the first gay magazine, began publication. The next year, the physician Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first gay-rights organization.

Better ideas with Dr NakaMats: "One thing I have learnt is that oxygen is the enemy of ideas, so to come up with the best ideas you need to get away from it. By diving underwater and holding your breath you can come up with the best ideas, they will come to you when you are 0.5 seconds away from death."

The Photoshop of Sound - The New Yorker: On a recent visit to Oliveto, a nouvelle Italian restaurant in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland, California, I paid attention less to the food than to the sound. I was at a table of six, in the restaurant’s upstairs section. It was a Friday night, and by the middle of the meal the room was crowded. Conditions were primed for restaurant cacophony: that inexorable crescendo of talking, barking, cackling, and clanking, which threatens to drown out any conversation and prompts diners to shout at one another, adding to the din. On this night, though, I found myself able to tune out the noise and hear only what I wanted to hear. When someone at a nearby table began guffawing at his own jokes, I could still follow the remarks of the calm-voiced man sitting next to me. Friends on the other side of the table spoke across the breadbasket without having to raise their voices. Although we were aware of a general buzz, it all happened at a comfortable distance.

How we built the new BBC Homepage: The new BBC mobile Homepage is a flexible ‘taster menu’ of the BBC's website. I’ve been leading the development of the new Homepage and in this post I explain some of the technical design decisions made during the initial phase of the project.

Interview: Bruce Sterling on the Convergence of Humans and Machines « NextNature.net: We have bits and pieces of the grand idea, but those pieces are big industries. They do not fit together to form one super thing. Siri can talk, but she cannot grip things. There are machines that grip and manipulate, but they do not talk. You end up with this unbundling of the metaphysical ideas and their replacement by actual products and services. Those products exist in the marketplace like most other artifacts that we have: like potato chips, bags, shoes, Hollywood products, games. They should be seen in that context, you should not dress these commercial products up, and say “Someday soon we will have the Artificial Intelligence Super Ghost.” I know there are guys in the business who are into that vision, but I do not think that the real captains of the industry, who are making multimillion dollar investments, believe any of that.

Science

Are We Becoming Morally Smarter? - Reason.com: Social scientists have gathered considerable evidence on the connection between various types of intelligence and moral values and behavior. Numerous studies from the 1980s onward, for example, find that intelligence and education are negatively correlated with violent crime. As intelligence and education increase, violence decreases, even when controlled for socioeconomic class, age, sex, and race. Even more intriguing is newer evidence that shows a positive correlation between literacy and moral reasoning, most particularly between reading fiction and being able to take the perspective of others.

Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher - NYTimes.com: For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity. One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming. But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests. He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008.

Scorched Earth, 2200AD: Welcome to Earth: population 500 million – Linda Marsa – Aeon: The religious and sectarian violence that dominated much of humanity’s history, in places such as the Middle East, Africa, southern Europe and even the US, are a relic of history, mainly because those parts of the world no longer exist. Autocratic nations such as China and Russia weathered the climate calamity best because they imposed the Draconian measures – closing borders to desperate migrants, rationing water and food, forcing relocation of millions. ‘Countries will fortify themselves against what they see as invaders, making it more likely that authoritarian states, like China, with all their bad properties will wind up winning,’ says Erik Conway, a science historian at Caltech and co-author with Naomi Oreskes of The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014).

Mummies and the Usefulness of Death | Chemical Heritage Foundation: The eating of Egyptian mummies reached its peak in Europe by the 16th century. Mummies could be found on apothecary shelves in the form of bodies broken into pieces or ground into powder. Why did Europeans believe in the medicinal value of the mummy? The answer probably comes down to a string of misunderstandings.

The Reality of Quantum Weirdness - NYTimes.com: IN Akira Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon,” a samurai has been murdered, but it’s not clear why or by whom. Various characters involved tell their versions of the events, but their accounts contradict one another. You can’t help wondering: Which story is true? But the film also makes you consider a deeper question: Is there a true story, or is our belief in a definite, objective, observer-independent reality an illusion? This very question, brought into sharper, scientific focus, has long been the subject of debate in quantum physics. Is there a fixed reality apart from our various observations of it? Or is reality nothing more than a kaleidoscope of infinite possibilities? This month, a paper published online in the journal Nature Physics presents experimental research that supports the latter scenario — that there is a “Rashomon effect” not just in our descriptions of nature, but in nature itself.

Culture

The Twee tribe – “the most powerful youth movement since Punk and Hip-Hop” | TLS: The “Twee Tribe” is characterized by a tendency to create highly stylized alternative modes of existence in opposition to competition-driven mass culture. Just as Greil Marcus sketched a history of influence from Dada via Situationism to punk in Lipstick Traces: A secret history of the twentieth century (1989), so Spitz creates a lineage of Twee from the 1950s to the present, one that includes Walt Disney, Dr Seuss, Edward Gorey, Holly Golightly, James Dean, Jonathan Richman, The Buzzcocks, Art Spiegelman, Sofia Coppola, Jonathan Safran Foer and Lena Dunham, among many others.

Why memes succeed | Ars Technica: What causes a particular meme to take the Internet by storm, dominating image boards and inspiring hundreds of variations, while another one languishes? It’s a tantalizing question in the nascent field of meme theory, and not just because the answer could shed light on our collective online subconscious. It’s also possible that research into it could eventually explain broader aspects of cultural consumption—why an entire work, perhaps even a novel or a painting, might gain a following, flop, or eventually fade into obscurity.